Core concepts¶
Six ideas explain how Renbase behaves. They're worth ten minutes: most surprises come from expecting a search engine and getting a governed one.
The corpus: two kinds of content¶
Your organization's corpus holds two things, and answers draw from both at once.
Documents are what's already written: manuals, policies, handbooks, meeting notes. You upload them, Renbase processes and indexes them, and their content becomes answerable. See Documents.
Definitions are what your organization has decided. They don't live in any file — or they live in four contradictory ones. A metric that means something specific here, the official source for "customer", a rule about which system holds which records. See Business definitions.
The distinction matters because the failure modes differ. A document can be outdated; a definition can be disputed. Renbase treats both as first-class, and an answer can cite one of each.
Collections¶
A collection organizes one organization's documents: support, policies, legal. You create one by naming it on upload, and you can scope a question to one collection.
Collections don't separate customers — organizations do that. Two organizations can both have a support collection with the same file names and never see each other's content.
Approval: nothing is served unattended¶
Any definition produced by a machine — an import from your existing tooling, an automatic suggestion — is created as a draft. Drafts are invisible to answers. Someone with an admin role reviews the queue and approves, edits or rejects.
That single rule is what makes the corpus trustworthy: everything shaping an answer has a person's name attached to it.
Editing an approved definition doesn't overwrite it. It creates a new version that supersedes the previous one, and the history stays queryable — because "this changed in March" is itself worth knowing.
Citations and provenance¶
Every answer carries citations, and every citation carries more than a link:
- Which document or definition supports the claim
- Which version of it
- Who approved it, for definitions
- When it was last verified against its source
That's what makes an answer defensible in a review. When someone asks "why did it say that?", the answer is on the record rather than reconstructed.
Abstention, conflict and staleness¶
Three situations where Renbase declines to give you a clean answer, on purpose:
No support. Nothing in the corpus answers the question. You get an explicit abstention rather than a fluent guess. The right fix is content, not prompting: upload the document or add the definition.
Conflict. Two approved definitions of the same term overlap — finance counts one way, product another. Both are returned, marked as conflicting, with their provenance. Renbase doesn't pick a winner in silence; your team resolves it.
Staleness. A definition's source disappeared or changed. The entry is flagged stale rather than deleted, and answers that rely on it say so. Withdrawing it is a human decision.
Organizations, members and keys¶
The organization is the owning entity: it holds the corpus, the members, the keys and the usage.
Members are people, with a role of admin or read. They sign in with a one-time code sent to their email — there are no passwords to manage or leak. Admins invite members, approve definitions and issue keys; readers ask questions.
API keys are credentials for services and agents, not for people. Issue one per integration so you can revoke it in isolation; revocation takes effect immediately.
Every request, whether from a person, a service or an agent, is scoped to the organization behind its credential. Content from another organization is not merely filtered from the results — it is out of reach.